Call Down the Hawk

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Ronan narrowed his eyes.

  “Don’t gimme that look, Ronan. All you know is that he told you he was a dreamer,” Adam said. “You can believe him, but nothing says I have to. Earlier today you had a gun on me. I’m just asking you give him the same shake as me.”

  Again, just as when Ronan had been holding the gun on Adam, there was no distress, no anger. Adam would never judge someone else for their skepticism. His default setting was mistrust.

  “Okay,” said Ronan.

  Adam went in.

  He cast his eyes down to the sun in his hand. For the first few seconds, he blinked, blinked, blinked. He had to. The light was searing; Ronan couldn’t look at it for any longer than a stolen glance, and even then, it left green contrails in his vision.

  After a few seconds, Adam’s blinks grew further and further apart.

  And then they were just open.

  The sun reflected in his eyes, two fiery miniature suns contained in his pupils.

  He was absolutely motionless.

  It was an eerie image: this gaunt young man poised over the sun, his gaze unflinching and blank, something about the hang of his shoulders indicating vacancy.

  Ronan watched the second hand count off time. He watched Adam’s chest rise and fall.

  Five minutes. It was unnatural for someone to sit still for a minute, much less two. By five, it became truly unsettling.

  Six minutes. The dark had begun to dance with many green orbs from Ronan glancing at the sun and then away as he checked Adam’s watch.

  Seven minutes.

  Eight.

  At nine minutes, Ronan began to get antsy. He fidgeted, counting down the seconds.

  At nine and a half, Adam began to scream.

  It was such an awful sound that, at first, Ronan was pinned in place.

  It was not a proper scream, anything that conscious Adam would have done, even in pain. It was a high, thin, reedy sound, like something being torn in two. It didn’t waver. It threw back Adam’s head and buckled his shoulders and let the sun roll across the comforter.

  It was the sound of something that knew it was dying.

  The dim walls of the room felt like they absorbed it. Somehow this scream would always be embedded in the plaster, needled into the supports of the house, gasping in the places no one ever saw. Somehow there would always be a thing that would never be happy and whole again.

  “Adam,” Ronan said.

  Adam stopped breathing.

  “Adam.”

  Ronan seized Adam’s shoulders and shook. The moment he released him, Adam slumped down and away. An unconscious body has an uncompromising feel to it; it is uninterested in reason and emotion.

  “Parrish,” Ronan snarled. “You aren’t allowed—”

  He pulled Adam up and held him close, feeling for breath, for pulse. Nothing, nothing.

  The seconds tilted by.

  Adam’s body didn’t breathe. Adam’s mind wheeled, untethered, through infinite dreamspace. Wherever it was, it didn’t recall Adam Parrish, Harvard student; Adam Parrish, Henrietta-born; Adam Parrish, Ronan Lynch’s lover. Adam Parrish, cut loose from his physical body, was fascinated by things so ephemeral and huge that these tiny human concerns didn’t even register.

  Ronan dug for the little talon knife.

  “I’m sorry,” Ronan said to him, and then he flicked it open.

  The talons winged out, clawing, tearing, a chaos of claws, snarling up Adam’s arm.

  Blood welled immediately.

  Ronan snicked the knife shut and the talons receded, pulling a mighty rasp out of Adam’s chest as they did.

  “Oh God oh God oh God—” Adam curled down into himself, his eyes closed, rocking.

  Ronan fell back in relief. He hurled the talon knife away from the bed and pressed a hand against his own galloping heart.

  “What happened?” he demanded.

  Adam’s chest was still heaving for breath. The rest of him quivered. “Oh God oh God—”

  “Adam.”

  Adam pressed the back of his hand to his forehead, a strange, un-Adam-like gesture, and rolled it back and forth like a child might when tired or anxious. Ronan took it instead, holding it still. Adam’s skin was icy cold, as if he had taken his body to outer space. He didn’t seem to notice that his arm was bleeding from the talon knife; he still seemed a little unaware of his body. Ronan rubbed Adam’s fingers between his hands until they were warm and then kissed them.

  “Parrish, that was fucked up,” Ronan said. He laid a palm on Adam’s pale cheek. It, too, was frigid. Adam turned his face into Ronan’s hand, his eyes shuttered.

  “It saw me,” Adam said. “Oh God.”

  “What is it?”

  Adam didn’t answer.

  Ronan bundled him close and for several minutes, the two of them stayed like that, tightly wound together, lit by the abandoned dreamt sun, Adam’s skin cold as the moon.

  “It’s not Bryde,” Adam said finally. “The something, it’s not Bryde.”

  “How do you know?”

  Adam said, “Because whatever it is, it’s afraid of him.”

  No one noticed the teen girl who came into the gallery a few minutes before the event. The gallery was a large and modern Arlington establishment called 10Fox, just five miles outside Washington, DC, come to our showroom and consult with our stylists to make your estate a place of art. The front of the house was currently overwhelmed with many dozens of children. Four hundred, the publicist guessed, not counting the parents. Good call on the early start time, go us, go team. You got this, she told her author. Four-hour signing line, everyone’s home for late lunch, happy ending.

  Jason Morgenthaler did not see anything happy about the situation. He was the owner of 10Fox. He was also a very famous picture-book author. His books were so omnipresent that most children who read them assumed that he must be dead. His most popular work, Henderson!, was given to tens of thousands of children by tens of thousands of grandparents each holiday season, and his Skunkboy series had been made into a television series with an extremely annoying theme song. He was currently separated from his wife, who was a famous stand-up comedian. Morgenthaler considered himself a serious artist and a serious art collector and a serious art dealer and he was mostly correct about one of these things.

  He did not want to leave the gallery’s back room.

  Morgenthaler had never liked children, and recently they had become absolutely repellant to him. Children were tiny anarchists, miniature id-monsters from hell. They did what they wanted whether or not it was a good idea, and whether or not they had permission. When they wanted to eat, they ate; when they wanted to crap, they crapped. They bit, they screamed, they laughed until they puked.

  Morgenthaler peered around the corner.

  “Oh God,” he said. The adults in the room were vastly outnumbered. Two of them were booksellers, standing at attention behind a table set up with picture books. Another two were dressed in enormous full-body mascot costumes, one a skunk and one an enormous-headed girl, terrifying in her proportions.

  The publicist patted his arm. She found his pathological burnout droll. She gestured to the other staff behind him.

  “Go time,” the publicist said.

  Morgenthaler finger-combed his colorless brown hair before entering from the back of the gallery, flanked by three more adults in mascot costumes: a green dog, an alarmingly large-headed old man, and something that was supposed to be a squid. One of the children in the front row began to cry, though it was hard to tell if it was from an excess of terror or an excess of excitement.

  From the back of the room, Lin Draper, mother of three, watched Morgenthaler’s presentation. He had a relentlessly oval-shaped head, she thought, like it had been drawn by someone who’d not seen a real human head for a while. She had expected him to be different, somehow, when she loaded her daughter India into the car to come to the event. More family friendly. He had already sworn twice during his introduction and he see
med a little sweaty. He had dressed himself in a black sport coat and white V-neck T-shirt paired with red Chucks, an outfit that aggressively notified onlookers that he was both collector and artist, both the money and the talent. Morgenthaler was using the sort of jolly voice adults often used on children: “Would you believe I thought I was going to be a famous writer of adult novels? I intended to be a serious painter of representational art. But no, my agent said I was better suited to children, and so here I am still after ten years—”

  “Can I hold your hand?” India whispered.

  Lin realized with the ground-swallowing shame only made possible through awkward parenting moments that her little daughter was talking not to her, but to a redheaded teen girl.

  She admonished India in a low voice and whispered to the redheaded girl, “I’m so sorry—”

  “It’s all right,” the girl said. She offered her hand to India without any hesitation. India slid her chubby palm into the teen’s and then, impulsively, kissed the back of her hand.

  “India,” Lin said, horrified. “Let’s go have a talk outside.”

  “Bless you,” whispered the teen girl to India as her mother dragged her off, her expression blissful and vague.

  “Why don’t we just go to a Q and A!” one of the booksellers said with the bright tone that sounded fine and meant nothing is fine.

  As the booksellers began to solicit questions from the children (“How old are you?” “Is Clancy based on a real person?” “Do you have any dogs?” “What are their names?”), some of the other children cozied up to the teen girl, leaning on her or touching her leg or, like India, clutching her hand. They were far more transfixed by her than by Morgenthaler.

  Morgenthaler’s voice was rising and getting less jolly. “Actually, Maria—did you say your name was Maria? The reason why there are dolls for Henderson and not for Skunkboy is because of a drawn-out legal battle for merchandising rights because it turns out you need to get yourself a lawyer who’s not sleeping with your spouse if you want good—What, you have something to say about the way I run my events?”

  This last statement seemed to be directed toward the old-man costume.

  Morgnthaler wound up and punched the head right off the old-man costume.

  There was a moment of silence as the old-man head flew off, followed by an equal and opposing measure of sound as it careened into the seated children.

  Morgenthaler regarded all of this with a disheveled look before hurling himself at the headless body.

  Chaos ensued. More mascots were struck. The stuffed chair managed to gallop into the frontmost row of seated children. A parent was slapped. Picture books flew through the air, pages rustling like injured birds. There was fur stuck to Morgenthaler from one of the costumes. His inner child—a tiny anarchist, a miniature id-monster—was screaming to be free.

  Everything was anarchy, except for the redheaded teen girl standing in the back of the crowd.

  “Kill your dreams now, children!” Morgenthaler shrilled. “Kill them before New York gets to them and mutates them like … like …”

  The squid suit dragged him into the back.

  After they had all gone—the children, the parents, the booksellers, the publicist, the mascots—Morgenthaler shuffled back out into his gallery and stood in the afternoon light. The gallery was an enormous concrete and glass space now that everyone was gone. His phone was buzzing. He was sure it was his agent. He did not want to talk to his agent.

  He looked up and realized he was not alone in the gallery. A teen girl remained. She stood next to a swirling 3-D piece that he had offered to represent because he didn’t understand it. She had red hair and looked nothing like his estranged wife, but suddenly he was reminded of what it was like to find one of her hairs on his clothing. It was not a pleasant feeling.

  He thought he had locked the door.

  “The event’s over,” he said. “It’s all over.”

  “I’m looking for Hennessy,” she said.

  “What?”

  She didn’t repeat herself. “I believe that you can help me.”

  Morgenthaler couldn’t even help himself. He’d tried to open a bottle of sparkling water just five minutes ago to drown his sorrows and had found the lid too difficult to get off.

  “I don’t know any Hennessy,” he said.

  The girl pointed to a painting on the wall. “But you must. Hennessy painted that.”

  She was pointing at a painting called River Scene. The artist’s name—Joe Jones—was in the corner, as was a date: 1941.

  “Kid,” Morgenthaler said, “that’s a sixty-thousand-dollar painting from, like, a hundred years ago. Joe’s dead. I don’t know who you’re looking for. Ask me something else.”

  She scrutinized his expression, then rubbed her elbow softly, absently. “Can I … stay here?”

  “What?”

  “Just for tonight.” She gestured to the chic couch close to River Scene. “Please.”

  Okay, she was homeless. Things made sense to him now. The publicist had said something about homeless people just the other day, but he couldn’t remember what. He wondered if he wasn’t a good listener.

  “There’s shelters,” he told the girl. Probably there were shelters. This seemed like a thing that happened in cities, and this was a city.

  “I need to stay someplace without people.”

  She was not crying, but she was twisting her hands fast in the way Morgenthaler knew usually preceded tears. He hoped she didn’t actually cry because then he would cry; he had always been both a sympathetic puker and crier.

  “You can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry. It wouldn’t be right. There’s valuable stuff here.”

  He expected her to protest again, but she went to the door gently, without another word. When he opened the door, he felt a rush of warm air from the street, strange in this weather. The door closed behind her. He locked it.

  She would be all right, he thought. Probably. Right?

  He felt strangely bereft as the seconds ticked by. It was not what she had asked for but what she hadn’t asked for. It wasn’t that she reminded him of his wife; it was that she hadn’t. It wasn’t that she had made him forget about the frustration of the day; it was that she had made him feel it even more acutely.

  Suddenly, he threw back the bolt, pushed open the door, and rushed a few steps down the walk.

  “Hey,” he shouted. “Hey!”

  She had made it several yards already. She stopped on the sidewalk.

  “I’ll drive you,” he said. “To a shelter. To get some food.”

  She smiled very sweetly and very sadly, then shook her head, her feet already starting to take her away. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  She turned and walked away, and both of them began to cry.

  As night fell, Ronan walked Adam to the end of the driveway, Chainsaw hunched on his shoulder, the dreamt sun tucked into the hood of his sweater to cast some light around their feet. His three hours were up, and now the carriage was to turn back into a pumpkin, the horses back into mice. Adam was trying to ride the dreamt motorcycle at the same pace as Ronan’s fast walk, turning the handles this way and that to maintain a wobbly straight line, making the headlight shake its head uncertainly no. It seemed at any moment he would dump it, but he hadn’t yet. Ronan didn’t know where Adam had learned to ride in the first place. Possibly the mechanic he’d worked for during high school had taught him. Maybe someone at his warehouse job. Adam picked up skills like other people picked up clothing or groceries. He was always in the market.

  Now his shadowed face was lost in concentration. One hand rested lightly over the clutch lever and the other over the brake; the one over the brake was wrapped neatly with gauze, the only physical evidence of the scrying session. It was hard to tell what lingered mentally. Ronan knew that scream and the dread that came with it were going to live with him for a long time.

  There was something out there so awful that Adam couldn’t bear to
have it look at him.

  But whatever had made him scream was afraid of Bryde.

  Ronan’s mind turned this over and over and over.

  Just before the end of the driveway, Adam tried to stop the bike and dumped it instead, the front wheel buckling suddenly to the left and depositing the bike on top of him. He made a soft, ordinary sound of pain and frustration, and Chainsaw flapped off, looking betrayed. The two of them heaved it back up.

  “I always forget …” Adam said, but didn’t say what he always forgot.

  Ronan threw his leg over the bike instead, holding the wheel straight, taking care not to make the same mistake Adam had. Sitting on it felt good, physical, tangible. “Next time you can teach me how to do this the real way, Parrish.”

  “Return the favor,” Adam said, and after a moment, Ronan realized he was talking about the time long ago when Ronan had taught him to drive stick shift. “You don’t have to do this for me.”

  Ronan peered into the darkness, where the dreamy security system hung invisibly over the end of the driveway. “I go in and out of it every day. I’m used to it.”

  Adam made a dubious sound. But he didn’t reject the gift.

  “Take the sun thing.” Ronan waited until Adam had reached into his hood to retrieve the sun. “That tree over there, the oak with that low branch? Walk around the outside of that one to the road and you’ll be clear of it. I’ll meet you out there.”

  It struck Ronan then that he didn’t want Adam to go. For many reasons: beginning with the bad feeling of that scream, proceeding through the way his body would miss Adam’s when he curled in his bed, and finishing with the knowledge that something big and unknown lurked out there, unseeable to his dreamer’s eyes, seeable to Adam’s uncanny ones. It seemed incorrect that Adam visiting would have made his loneliness worse, but he missed him acutely even as he was looking at him.